Rape Story

Not for the faint of heart:

“I made these for us to celebrate,” he said, sauntering out of the kitchen with two shot glasses full of a red concoction.

“Celebrate what?” I asked.

He cocked his head to one side. “You’re here!” he cheered. “You finally made it.”

I had been on a long, grueling bus ride up from Washington DC to his apartment in New York. It was already 9:45 p.m on a Friday last summer. I felt sore and had just taken a shower to rid the bus experience from my skin. I laughed and, holding the towel around my waist in one hand and the shot glass in the other, I looked at it. “What’s in it?”

“Gin!” I thought he said, more excitedly than he should have. Gin makes me sick. “That’s not really my thing,” I said. Then he pouted, comically and even adorably: “But I made it just for us.”

So I drank it and it was a bit sharp but really delicious, like tart watermelon. “You can hardly taste the gin,” I said.

“What gin?”

“You said there was gin.”

He laughed. “I said G.” He meant GHB, gamma-hydroxybutyric acid, commonly known as the date-rape drug. Later came several more druggings, as he held Gatorade up to my limp lips with who-knows-what mixed in. I spent the weekend — about 60 hours — semi-conscious and didn’t leave his apartment until Monday morning. Sometimes I think I never left his apartment, that someone who merely looks and sounds like me walked out.

I’m sure you can imagine what happened next – the author is a guy, by the way. While it may be surprising, more men are raped than women (largely in prisons). While nobody wants to dwell on the misery of their experiences, it can certainly help to humanize these sensitive topics. Reading the rest of the story made me sick.